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N.O. Sewerage and Water Board director Marcia St. Martin says she will retire this year

Mitch Landrieu, Marcia St. Martin

Mayor Mitch Landrieu and Sewage and Water Board executive director Marcia St. Martin walk through Drainage Pump Station #1 Wednesday, February 9, 2011. St. Martin said Wednesday she will retire at the end of the year.
(John McCusker, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)

Marcia St. Martin, a four-decade veteran of City Hall who rose to become both the first woman and the first African-American to lead the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board, guiding the agency though Hurricane Katrina and the flooding that took such a heavy toll on the city's water infrastructure, announced Wednesday that she plans to retire at the end of the year.

St. Martin, the agency's executive director since 2004, will leave office during one of the most important transitions for the board in decades. With the agency gearing up for post-storm repairs expected to run several billion dollars, Mayor Mitch Landrieu is pushing to overhaul how the water board is governed, heeding warnings from the city's independent inspector general that the agency as structured is vulnerable to fraud and abuse.

The board is planning a national search for St. Martin's successor with the hope to have a new executive director in place before she leaves, spokesman Robert Jackson said. What's less clear is whether the new director will answer to the current board or one retooled by the Legislature.

Either way, the hiring will rest largely with the mayor, who appoints most of the board's members and will continue to have a majority on the board should the reforms take place.

St. Martin announced her retirement at a meeting of the agency's board Wednesday morning. The decision apparently surprised some board members, who had expected St. Martin to stay on until at least through 2014; they gave her a standing ovation for her service to the city.

St. Martin, 66, said the decision to retire was her own. She briefly recalled the high points of serving in various areas of city government for more than 40 years, beginning with the challenges posed by fuel shortages during the Arab oil embargo of 1973, and mentioned that finally leaving her post will give her a chance to have the knee surgery she has been delaying since an injury sustained during Katrina.

"That's going to be one of the first things I do," she said. "Definitely put my feet up."

In contrast to the power and stature that St. Martin achieved at City Hall, she stands just under 5 feet tall and has had trouble walking recently. She told the board Wednesday that in the wake of Katrina, feeling obliged to lead her staff on the ground, she ventured into water that was deeper than she thought and took a fall.

St. Martin earned high praise for her efforts after the storm, garnering an "Excellence in Government" award in 2007 from the Bureau of Governmental Research, a group that keeps a deeply skeptical eye on city agencies.

Getting the city's water system running again was a crucial step before residents could return, and St. Martin did a "tremendous job, even though her own home and much of the city was just devastated," BGR President Janet Howard said.

The corruption scandals that have so often engulfed branches of local government in New Orleans have never touched St. Martin directly, but the water board did see controversy during her tenure. Board member Benjamin Edwards ultimately admitted in 2010 that he had used his position to engineer a kickback scheme that landed himself and his brother millions of taxpayer dollars.

More recently, the size of St. Martin's retirement package has produced headlines. Last year, WVUE-TV reported that St. Martin will be in line to collect an annual pension of $175,000 when she leaves office, along with a one-time lump-sum amounting to several hundred thousand dollars from the city's Deferred Retirement Option Plan.

The revelation appeared at a particularly awkward time, with the water board and the City Council contemplating and then passing one of the biggest water rate hikes in recent memory, a step aimed at raising money for badly needed post-Katrina repairs and upgrades.

At Wednesday's meeting, water board member Loyce Wright alluded to the "troubled waters" the agency has had to operate in, both after the storm and in the past year, telling St. Martin, "I hope the fact that you've traveled these troubled waters did not contribute to your early retirement."

"As you stand for justice," she continued, "the fight is not easy and it is not comfortable. You have stood tall, standing up to the Army Corps of Engineers, standing up to the negative comments that citizens have made."

In stepping down on Dec. 31, St. Martin will end a career in city government spanning four decades and a broad range of responsibilities. A New Orleans native and a product of the city's Catholic school system, St. Martin served as Safety and Permits director for three years and as parking administrator for six years before moving to the Sewerage & Water Board in 1991 to serve as deputy director.

In her brief remarks on Wednesday, she recalled for the board dealing with gas shortages in the 1970s by switching some of the city's fleet to cheaper diesel fuel, going back to school at Delgado Community College to gain expertise in automotive technology and developing a vocational program for students at Carver High School that led some -- now "gray-haired" veterans -- to fruitful careers at her own agency.

St. Martin served as interim director at the water board for 15 months beginning in 2003, after the board fired her predecessor, Harold Gorman. At the time, City Hall was pushing to privatize the agency because of long-standing criticism over wastefulness and mismanagement. Ultimately, after a national search, the water board handed St. Martin the position of permanent executive director in 2004 at Mayor Ray Nagin's urging and shelved plans to turn operations over to a private company.

After a unanimous vote for St. Martin at the water board, Nagin said, "I'm confident that this is a new day and we're heading in a new direction."

Then came the storm. St. Martin's leadership during the flood earned her plaudits, but it also saddled her agency with expensive, complex problems, including pipes that won't stop leaking and a power plant whose periodic failures have left citizens stuck boiling their tap water on several occasions since the storm.

After the mayor last year proposed hiking residents' water bills to pay for wide-ranging repairs, the city's inspector general, Ed Quatrevaux, and BGR, both issued scathing reports on the water board. Quatrevaux warned that the agency was "most likely of the city's component entities to engage in fraud, waste and abuse," and BGR urged the mayor to address the board's "dysfunctional governance" before asking residents to swallow bigger water bills.

Neither report mentioned St. Martin by name, but taken together left the impression that she was not an official who could be counted on to tame the agency herself.

Still, city officials lauded St. Martin after she announced her retirement on Wednesday. Deputy Mayor Cedric Grant, who serves as the mayor's proxy on the board, recalled that St. Martin taught his eighth-grade catechism course, and placed her next to figures like Dutch Morial, the city's first black mayor, for helping to dismantle color barriers in city government.

Alluding to the challenges that face City Hall now, Grant told St. Martin, "If I can do half as well as you have and survive this and actually walk out of it standing, I'll feel like I've been a success."

City Council President Stacy Head, who also serves on the water board and has been highly critical of the agency's generous retirement benefits, also spoke highly of St. Martin's leadership, pointing out her national and even international reputation and asking that she continue to offer the agency her expertise.